


Shed Your Skin to Save It

by adventurepants



Category: Charmed
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Future, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-14
Updated: 2014-09-14
Packaged: 2018-02-17 10:14:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2306054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adventurepants/pseuds/adventurepants
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>This isn't right.  This isn't right that they should be left here, a whole decade gone that they can't remember because it hadn't happened to them.  When they go to sleep they'll wake up back in 1999, the way they woke up here, and they'll be home and she'll be 28 again and Phoebe will be alive.</i>  (A "Morality Bites" AU in which Prue and Piper remain in 2009 after Phoebe's death.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shed Your Skin to Save It

Prue finds her new address on the license in her wallet, but she knows she'll go back to the manor with Piper—wherever she's living now isn't home, and she couldn't be there alone even if it were. Piper is shaking too much to drive, so Prue takes her keys and drives them home. She thinks of her chauffeur and wonders if she drives herself anywhere these days, whether the motions would be unfamiliar now if she had any memory of the time they'd lost.

This isn't right. This isn't right that they should be left here, a whole decade gone that they can't remember because it hadn't happened to them. When they go to sleep they'll wake up back in 1999, the way they woke up here, and they'll be home and she'll be 28 again and Phoebe will be alive. They'll hold her as tight as they can and everything about this nightmare will start to feel so far away. A lesson they had to learn, but not a life sentence.

She has to believe this. If she doesn't then she won't get through this night.

Piper's cell phone rings while they're in the car. It's more straight forward than Prue's, some ridiculous touch screen thing by Apple that she can barely figure out how to use, and on any other day Prue would laugh that being thrust ten years into the future has turned her into Grams, who refused to get a computer.

“It's Leo,” Piper says. “I can't.”

She lets it ring until voicemail picks up, and then it starts again. Prue holds out her hand for it. “Leo,” she says as she answers, “this isn't really a good time.”

“Prue,” he says. “Where's Piper?”

“She's not up for a chat right now, maybe you can call back later when we haven't just watched our sister-”

Prue's voice catches, and she can't say it. Next to her, Piper covers her mouth to muffle a sob.

“Prue, I'm sorry,” Leo says. He sounds like he means it, but it doesn't matter. Phoebe's still gone, they still had to watch it happen.

“Is that what you called to say? You're sorry?”

“I called to talk to her about our daughter, Prue,” he says.

“Is she all right?” Prue asks, and Piper looks up quickly.

“She's fine,” Leo says. “I'm bringing her home tomorrow after school. I called because she wants to say goodnight to her mother.”

Prue doesn't answer him for a moment. “Hold on,” she finally says, and takes the phone away from her ear. “Piper. Melinda wants to say goodnight.”

Piper looks panicked for a moment, and Prue wants to shield her from this, too, from the pain of having a daughter she doesn't _know_ , but she's not very good at protecting anyone she loves, lately. Piper takes the phone.

“Hello,” she says. “Yes. Put her on.”

Prue reaches for Piper's hand and Piper holds it like it's the only thing keeping her tethered.

“Hi, sweetheart... No, honey, I'm not crying, I'm okay... Are you all right at your dad's house?... I miss you too. I'll see you tomorrow, okay? Be good at school... I love you too, Melinda. Good night.”

Piper hangs up the phone, and they're silent for the rest of the drive. 

At home, they go straight to bed, because all they want is for this day to be over. Prue's old bedroom is now Piper's, and Piper's is Melinda's, so Prue takes Phoebe's. It's just a guest room now, but it feels a little like being close to her anyway. She's been in bed for ten minutes when Piper knocks on the door. “Come here,” Prue says, pulling the covers back for her. 

Piper hasn't had to do this since they were little girls, since the first months after their mom died. Phoebe would run for Grams when she had nightmares, but Piper always wanted her big sister. “It's okay,” Prue would tell her, hugging her close. “I'll keep you safe.”

She can't make that promise anymore, as much as she wants to, and she wishes she had a way to make this all _stop_ when Piper whispers, “I want her back, Prue.”

“I know,” Prue says. “I know.”

In the morning, it's still 2009. Prue gets out of bed and stares at her ten-years-older face in the bathroom mirror. There are lines where there weren't before, but it's not so bad. It's not the aging that bothers her so much as it is knowing that a decade of their lives are _gone_. Who were they here? Who was she that she had nothing in her life but a job? She tugs at her face. The lines she can deal with, but her hair is another matter entirely.

She goes back to her bedroom and nudges Piper awake. Piper mumbles and opens her eyes and then closes them again as she seems to remember what year it is. “It's still real, isn't it?” she says.

“Yeah,” Prue says, smoothing Piper's hair away from her face. “It's still real.”

Piper keeps her eyes shut and her chin starts to tremble, and Prue leans down to kiss her forehead. “I need to go get something, okay? I'll be right back, I promise.”

Piper nods and doesn't make any move to get up, and Prue remembers her on the morning of their mother's funeral, how she had curled into a ball in bed and gripped the sheets in her small fists as if just refusing to move would make this not be happening. She remembers Phoebe, too, so little and confused, how she'd screamed for their mom when Grams had tried to wrestle her into a dress.

Prue takes Piper's Jeep and comes back 45 minutes later to find Piper still in bed. She holds out the box of hair dye she'd gone out for and says, “Will you help me dye my hair back to normal?”

Piper sits up reluctantly, as if the sheets pull at her limbs—as if she's fighting more than gravity, and of course she is. “Don't you probably have some fancy stylist on speed dial, now?”

Prue shrugs. “Probably.” She throws the box to Piper. “Come on. Out of bed.”

Piper follows her obediently to the bathroom and opens the box, putting on the plastic gloves and spreading out the instructions. Letting her sister dye her hair before she's had coffee is not the wisest idea Prue's ever had, but she knows that with a task in front of her Piper will feel less hopeless, at least for a little while.

“I don't know why you ever let me dye my hair blonde, I look ridiculous,” Prue says.

Piper scowls at her in the mirror. “What makes you think I let you do it?” She squirts a glob of dye onto Prue's head, and says quietly after a moment, “Phoebe probably thought it was a good idea.”

Prue blinks a few times and swipes a tear away from her cheek. “She probably did.”

Piper spreads the dye through Prue's too-long hair. “What are we going to do?”

“Well,” Prue says. “I'm gonna wash this gunk out of my hair in about twenty minutes while you make coffee, and then I'm gonna dig through your closet for something to wear while you take a shower. And then we'll go find out where I live now, and be home in time for Leo to drop your daughter off after school.”

“I meant-” Piper begins, but Prue interrupts her.

“I know.”

She means- How can they stay here? How can they carry on with these lives that don't feel like theirs? How can they do this without Phoebe?

When her hair's done, and she's showered and dressed and looks like a close enough approximation of the woman she'd been yesterday morning, she finds Piper in the kitchen with her hands around a mug of coffee, staring at something on a laptop. “How do I look?” she asks.

Piper puts her mug down, looks Prue over and almost, almost smiles. “You look like my sister again,” she says.

“Good,” Prue says, and pours her own coffee.

“The internet is really fast now,” Piper says, as Prue stirs sugar into her mug. “And,” she adds, tapping the side of the laptop, “you don't have to plug it into the phone line anymore.”

“What?” Prue says, turning to face her and leaning against the counter by the coffee maker.

“I know. I thought it was a spell at first, but I think it's just normal. Anyway, come look what I found,” Piper says.

Prue sits down next to her sister, who has discovered a folder full of pictures of her daughter. Melinda on birthdays and Christmases and first days of school. Melinda at the beach, at the zoo, dressed up like princesses and superheroes on Halloween with buckets of candy in her hands. Melinda with Piper, Melinda with Leo, Melinda with both of them. “She's perfect,” Prue says. 

“She is,” Piper says, and she does smile now, despite everything. 

Prue feels just a little lighter inside, a little less lost, but even so- “I'm not in any of these pictures.”

Piper clicks through a few more. “Neither is Phoebe,” she says. “What happened to us?”

Prue shakes her head. “I can't imagine us not being close. I can't imagine having a niece and not wanting to be with her all the time.”

Piper scrolls back to the top of the folder. “You were there when she was born,” she says. She clicks on one of the first pictures. It's Prue, holding a bundle of blankets in her arms and smiling like nothing bad can ever touch her. Phoebe is pressed against her side, head on Prue's shoulder and grinning at the baby. “I can't do this without you,” Piper says.

Prue looks through dozens of pictures of Piper in the hospital with her new baby, of the three of them together with newborn Melinda. They still looked like a family, then. “We'll do better,” Prue says. “I'll do better.”

*

Prue's new address leads them to a lavish apartment full of expensive art and futuristic kitchen appliances and a bigger closet than she's ever seen in her life. The place looks barely lived in, which isn't a surprise—it's become very clear she sees more of her office than anywhere else, that she sees more of her assistant than her sisters. (Than her sister, she tells herself, and wonders if she can ever get used to having just one.)

Her phone beeps, and on the screen is a message with her assistant's name on it, asking where she is. Prue thinks it's an email, but there's a separate icon on her phone for mail, and this is something else. Little green and grey conversation bubbles. She scrolls up. Work, work, work.

She types out a reply and the phone fixes her typos on its own. Magic, she'd assume, if not for Piper's earlier discovery of wireless internet. “I'm sure you're aware from the news coverage that my sister died last night. I'll be in next week.”

Prue opens up her contacts list and scrolls until she finds Phoebe's name. Phoebe had been in jail for months, but maybe her voicemail message would still be up. Maybe Prue could hear her sister's voice again.

“What is it?” Piper asks, and Prue shoves her phone back in her pocket.

“I don't want to live here,” she says.

“You don't have to,” Piper tells her. They're standing in Prue's living room. Piper had been going through a stack of mail, but now she puts it down, reaching for Prue's hand. “Move back home.”

“Yeah?” Prue grips her sister's hand, thinks about calling Phoebe's number again.

“Yes. I think we need to be together right now.”

Prue turns and lets go of Piper's hand so she can pull her into a hug. “Me too,” she says.

They drag an oversized suitcase out of Prue's closet and fill it full of clothes. Prue finds her lease agreement in a desk drawer and shoves it in her purse so she'll remember to cancel it. It occurs to her to take any perishable food out of the kitchen, but her refrigerator is nearly empty, just bottled water and Diet Coke and a carton of leftover Chinese that she dumps down the garbage disposal. She looks around for a computer before she realizes it would be at the office. Anything else in the apartment can wait until she comes back to pack it up and put the art and furniture in storage.

“All right,” she tells Piper. “Let's go home.”

*

When Leo brings Melinda home she runs straight for Piper, the way children do at the age when a day and a half away from their mothers seems like much longer. “Mommy!” she exclaims, crashing straight into Piper, who looks relieved to have her daughter in her arms. There is something good here, at least. There is something that hasn't been ruined.

Leo doesn't stay long. He looks guilty and worn down as he nods at Prue and Piper, and Prue tries to remember that he had cared about Phoebe too. He pulls a folded piece of paper out of his jacket pocket and hands it to Piper, and then smiles at Melinda like she's the only thing in the world worth smiling at. “Bye, sweetheart. I'll see you this weekend, okay?”

“Okay,” she says without reluctance, and hugs him goodbye. Prue guesses Piper and Leo have been separated long enough that Melinda is used to it. 

“If you need anything...” Leo says, and Prue's nails dig into her palms because they need plenty.

“Thank you, Leo,” Piper says, more kindly than Prue could manage.

When he leaves, Melinda looks up at Prue like she's a complete stranger.

“Your Aunt Prue's going to be staying with us for a while. You remember her, don't you?” Piper asks hopefully, but Prue knows the answer.

“Kind of,” Melinda says. “A little.” She knows Prue like she'd know an aunt who lives hours away, who she might see at Thanksgiving once a year.

Prue hates herself for it. “That's okay. We'll get to know each other really well,” she says, smiling at her niece. She wants desperately to know Melinda, to wrap her up in her arms and keep her safe. She can only imagine what it's like for Piper.

“Is Aunt Phoebe coming too?” Melinda asks.

Piper stands very still, but her voice wavers. “No, honey. She's not.”

“What's wrong, Mommy?” Melinda asks, and Prue realizes they have no idea how much Melinda knows about Phoebe.

“Sweetheart, your Aunt Phoebe...”

“She died,” Melinda says quietly, but it's obvious she hadn't known Phoebe well enough to feel any loss at her passing.

“Yes,” Piper says. “She did.” She's trying very hard not to cry, and Prue reaches for her hand.

“Some kids at school said she was dead now, but you told me not to believe everything I hear. Like when they say witches are bad people. Was Aunt Phoebe a bad person?”

Piper shuts her eyes and shakes her head and holds tightly to Prue's hand. 

“No,” Prue says. “Not the Phoebe we knew.”

“But she did a bad thing.”

Piper still doesn't speak, so Prue does the best she can. “Yes, she did a bad thing. It was for the right reason but it was still a bad thing.”

“Why did she do it?” Melinda asks.

“Well... sometimes, people get lost. Not like they don't know where they are, but they don't know who they are. They don't remember why being able to do something doesn't always mean you should do it.”

“So Aunt Phoebe was lost?”

Prue nods. “Me too.”

“Did Mommy find you?” Melinda asks, stealing glances at her mother's watery eyes.

“I think she's going to help,” Prue says.

Melinda hugs her mother again, and Piper's hands fall immediately to her daughter's hair. “Don't cry, Mommy,” Melinda says. “If you get lost, I can find you.”

*

Prue sits in the kitchen while Piper makes dinner, reading the letter Leo had given her sister. It's a Melinda cheat sheet—favorite foods, favorite books and movies and TV shows, favorite toys, the names of teachers and friends. The names of the women from the carpool and their schedule. Names and numbers of her pediatrician and dentist. Her birthday. Her power—telekinesis—which she's been forbidden to use.

There's a little about Piper, too. P3, the club she'd been trying to get a loan for right before they came here, had taken off. When they had Melinda she thought about going back to the restaurant business, but she loved P3 and Leo told her not to give it up, that they would make it work. She tried to avoid working as many late nights as she'd grown accustomed to, and she was always, always there when Melinda needed her.

Leo also includes the password to Piper's online bank account, and the password to something called a Netflix account. There's nothing about Prue, but Prue thinks she knows all she needs to already: she climbed the ranks at Buckland's, and she did it alone.

There's also nothing about Piper and Leo's relationship- when they'd gotten engaged, when they'd gotten married, when they'd decided to divorce and why. Piper says he'd told her they had tried to make it work and couldn't, but that's hardly the full story, and Prue thinks her sister is owed a full account of her own life, at least. Still, though. “It was nice of him, to write all this down for you.”

Piper is stirring something at the stove, and Prue realizes just how little she's eaten since coming here. “Yes,” Piper says. “I hate that I need it, though. I _hate_ that I'm not the person that little girl thinks I am.”

“Of course you are,” Prue says.

Piper turns around to face her. “Am I? I don't _know_ her. I've missed six years of my daughter's life and there is _nothing_ I can do to get them back. The Piper who was Melinda's mom is gone, and I'm just an impostor. You saw me out there, I had no idea what to say to her.”

“Piper, you'll learn. And you won't always know the right things to say, that's just life. That's being human. I know you, and there's no way you won't be a great mom.”

“It doesn't feel that way right now,” Piper says, stirring again, and checks on whatever she'd put in the oven.

“We just got here,” Prue says. “And we just lost Phoebe. Nothing's going to feel right for a while.” They're quiet for a moment before she asks, “Do you love her?”

“Yes,” Piper answers immediately. “Yes. When I hold her she feels like mine, it feels like... even if I don't know her yet, my heart does. And I would do anything for her.”

“Then her mom isn't gone,” Prue says. “She's right here.”

*

The next morning, Prue sits in the kitchen with the newspaper and tries to make sense of the world as it is now. Melinda comes downstairs, ready for school, and pulls a box of cereal out of the pantry. Piper follows moments later, grabs the milk out of the refrigerator and pours it into Melinda's cereal bowl before leaning over to kiss the top of her daughter's head.

Prue knows Piper, she knows that right now all her sister wants to do is hide in bed for half the morning, but she'd gotten up, braided her daughter's hair, and come downstairs to pour her milk so she wouldn't spill it.

Melinda sits next to her mother and across from Prue and studies her aunt carefully between bites of cereal. She glances at Piper a couple of times and then asks, quickly, like she knows she's breaking a rule and can't help it, “Aunt Prue, what's your power?”

Prue smiles, lifts her finger and swirls it around, making Melinda's spoon lazily stir what's left of her breakfast.

Melinda gasps. “That's mine too!”

Prue lowers the spoon back down, slow enough not to splash. “Will you show me?”

“I'm not allowed,” Melinda says, and her tiny sigh makes Prue frown at her sister.

“Don't look at me, I didn't...” Piper starts, but before she finishes her sentence she seems to remember that she must have been the one to tell Melinda no. Piper looks at her daughter. “Sweetheart, I know I told you not to use magic, but it's okay to use it at home. It's safe here.”

Melinda grins and gets up from the table to throw her arms around Piper. “Thank you, Mommy. Thank you, thank you.” 

Prue watches Piper soak up Melinda's affection, how she closes her eyes and all her tension seems to leave her. “All right,” Piper says. “Show Aunt Prue whatcha got.”

Melinda points across the room and the silverware drawer pops open. Spoons and forks rise out of it and dance along the countertop, and Prue laughs. Not since meeting their younger selves in the past has magic seemed so innocent. Melinda adds a knife to the procession, which Piper spots immediately. “No knives,” she says, and Melinda lets it clatter back into the drawer, giggling, like she's heard this before.

The carpool has arrived by the time the dancing silverware is back in place. Melinda grabs her backpack and kisses her mother goodbye, and then stops before she opens the front door to race back and hug Prue. “Can we do more magic after school?”

“Of course,” Prue tells her. “I'll be here when you get home.”

*

Leo warns them not to try to have a funeral, and Piper's eyes are so hard that Prue would be startled if she could feel anything in that moment other than rage.

“She was our _sister_ , Leo,” Piper says. “How dare you tell us how we can or can't say goodbye to her.”

He tries to explain that it would only put them in danger, that to openly mourn a convicted witch would raise suspicion, would be bad for them and for Melinda. The only reason Phoebe's ashes were released to them is that they're no longer under investigation, and Pratt doesn't believe they would be capable of using the ashes, or anything else, to resurrect her.

It doesn't matter what Leo thinks they should do, as it turns out. No funeral home in the city will hold services for a witch, and after being exposed as one, Phoebe had lost all her friends. Her sisters were all she had left in the world, and they had never even visited her in prison.

“To show support for a witch would have meant having Pratt and his crusaders watching you all the time. You stayed away for Melinda's sake,” Leo tells Piper.

“And I stayed away to protect my reputation,” Prue says. She hates herself. She can't possibly have become this person. 

“Prue,” Piper says, reaching for her arm.

“There is no excuse,” Prue says. “There is no excuse for who I became.”

“We had all those plans in the book to save her, though,” Piper says. “And the book was in your safe at Buckland's. We didn't abandon her entirely. You didn't.”

Prue remembers the flames rising until they couldn't see Phoebe at all; she remembers her baby sister's screams of pain, and the heat, and the smell of her burning. “It feels like we did.”

*

Prue doesn't even think about their father until Piper asks her, “Do you think Dad knows? About Phoebe?”

They're alone at P3 in the early afternoon, on a couch in a secluded corner with the remnants of their lunch in front of them. Their sister has been dead for a week, and there are long stretches of hours when it seems like they'll never learn how to exist in the world without her. But they remember, from losing their mom, from losing Grams, that it gets easier. (Prue thinks, if Piper dies, she'll die too. Her heart will just stop beating, her lungs will refuse to draw breath. She can't ever, ever do this again.)

“I'm sure he does,” Prue says. “It was national news.”

“Then why isn't he here? Why hasn't he at least called?”

He had shown up for their mother's funeral, Prue remembers. She was seven at the time, and thought that maybe it meant he was coming back to take care of them now that their mom was gone. She was still young enough that she hadn't yet learned to be mad at him—she just missed him. She just wanted him to stay.

She hid at the top of the stairs in her uncomfortable black dress to listen to him talk to Grams. 

“You know they're better off with you,” he said.

“Yes, I do,” said Grams. “Believe me, Victor, I'm not suggesting you take full custody. The girls will stay here, with me. But you are their father. The _very_ least you could do is stay in their lives.”

“I can't,” he said. “I don't expect you to understand.”

Prue had clung to him all day, thinking maybe if she showed him how much she needed him, he wouldn't go away again. But at the end of the day he had kissed her goodbye, kissed her sisters, and left without so much as a promise that he'd see them soon. Prue understood, at seven, that her mom was never coming back, but she was nine before she learned to stop wishing for her dad. She thinks Phoebe had never stopped wishing for either of them.

“I don't know, Piper,” she says now. “You know Dad, he... we couldn't ever really count on him, could we?”

“But she was his _daughter,_ ” Piper says. “She was his daughter, and... how are you and I the only people in the world who aren't okay that she's gone? We shouldn't have come here, Prue.”

“We had to try to save Phoebe.”

“And we would have had ten years to do it if we hadn't cast that stupid spell! Why did we think coming here was the answer, why did we think... we had so much _time_ , and now it's gone. And even if it had ended the same way, at least... at least I would remember my daughter being born. Her first word and her first steps. At least I could have had a little time with Leo, even if it ended.” Piper is wiping tears from her eyes, and Prue pulls her into her arms. She combs her fingers through Piper's hair and lets herself cry too, lets herself think of Phoebe's smile and her laugh and her silly voices and how fiercely she had loved them. 

“I'm sorry,” Prue says. “I'm sorry I couldn't save her.”

“Prue,” Piper says gently. “Don't put this all on yourself.”

But shouldn't she? She's the oldest, she's supposed to take care of them. She has all this power and she's supposed to use it to keep them safe. She's supposed to make sure they don't do stupid things, she's supposed to make sure they don't murder a human being and end up in jail and burned at the stake for their crime in some kind of barbaric witch trial throwback. (Distantly, she remembers Phoebe, nose in a book and squinting because she won't go to the god damn eye doctor, telling her, “According to this book, witches were never burned at the stake. They were hanged.”) 

She means to explain this all to Piper but all she can say is, “She was my little sister. She was my little sister and I couldn't save her.”

“She was mine, too,” Piper says.

They lean against each other and Prue ignores the three texts from her assistant asking when she's coming back from lunch. Now, she realizes, if she has to miss work to vanquish a demon, there's no boss to demand an explanation. She doesn't want to go back to work at all, to be honest, today or ever. Maybe when things settle down, when she is not motivated by grief, when she doesn't feel so out of place in this time, she can think about quitting. She could go back to photography, maybe. She could make a life here that she's proud of, and if their dad decides to show up again she can tell him she's never needed him less.

*

Piper's working that night, and Melinda's with her father, and Prue is home alone in a house full of memories. She curls up on the living room couch with a blanket and the remote. It's still jarring to turn on the TV and recognize nothing save for very old reruns, and she wonders how long it will be before she stops feeling like an outsider here. It's still early, but she's tired, and she starts to drift off until a blue light shimmers by the TV and then Leo is standing in front of her with Melinda in his arms.

“Prue, I'm sorry to ask you this,” he says, putting Melinda down, “but I have to go, and I didn't want to ask Piper to leave work. Can you watch Melinda?” He glances up at the ceiling like they're telling him to get there _now,_ and Prue remembers abruptly that he has other charges, other places to be. She wonders if it's part of why he and Piper didn't work out, if it's part of why Melinda is so accustomed to saying goodbye to him.

“Of course,” Prue says. “You don't even have to ask.”

He smiles at her gratefully, and kisses his daughter's forehead. “Goodnight, sweetheart. Be good for Aunt Prue.”

“Night, Daddy,” she says, and then he's gone. She's in her pajamas already, and she shuffles toward the couch, rubbing at her eyes. “Hi, Aunt Prue.”

“Hi, baby girl,” Prue says. She lifts up her blanket for Melinda and is glad for the company, glad for the way that Melinda has warmed to her immediately. Melinda crawls in under the blanket and snuggles right up against her, and the sadness in Prue's bones aches a little less. “So it's almost bedtime, huh?” she says, after half an episode of a sitcom she doesn't recognize.

Melinda nods, and yawns.

“Does your dad have to go like that a lot?”

“Uh huh,” Melinda says. “He's helping people.”

“Does he tell you about it?”

“He says he's not supposed to. But he always comes back. He promised he'll always come back.”

Prue kisses the top of Melinda's head and desperately hopes Leo can keep his promise, hopes that Piper will stay safe, so this little girl will never have to lose anything the way Prue and her sisters did.

“Can I stay up with you?” Melinda asks.

Prue glances at the clock on the wall. “Sure, and then your mom will kill me in the morning when you're too tired to get up for school.”

Melinda giggles. “But you're older than her.”

“Old as the hills, these days,” Prue says, and Melinda laughs again. “But she's your mom, so she's the boss when it comes to you.” She throws back the blanket and stands, and Melinda holds out her arms. She's really too big for someone Prue's size to carry, but Prue has never carried her and wants to. 

“Will you read me a story?” Melinda asks as she's lifted into Prue's arms.

“I will absolutely read you a story.”

“Two stories?” Melinda puts her head down on Prue's shoulder.

“You drive a hard bargain,” Prue tells her. “But you only get one story.”

“One and a half?”

“One.”

“One and a quarter?”

Prue laughs. “I love you,” she says, and it's easier now, not like it was for twenty years when _I love you_ was the last thing she said to her mother, the last thing she could ever imagine saying to anyone else. 

It was the last thing Phoebe said to her.

“I love you too,” says Melinda, sleepy but sure, and Prue carries her all the way up the stairs.

When Piper gets home, Prue's fallen asleep sitting up in Melinda's bed, with a second story open in her lap. She's learned to be a light sleeper in the last year, and her eyes snap open as she hears her sister's footsteps in the room. Melinda stirs next to her but doesn't wake.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” Piper says quietly.

“Hey,” Prue says. “Leo had to-”

“Had to go,” Piper finishes. “He texted me. So I guess there's at least one thing that hasn't changed. Thank you for putting her to bed.”

“Anytime,” Prue says. She stands up carefully, trying not to jostle Melinda. “What's wrong?” she asks Piper, who's frowning as she watches her daughter sleep.

Piper tilts her head toward the door, and Prue puts Melinda's book back on the shelf where she'd found it and follows her sister out of the room. 

“It's just... I know what it's like, to have an unreliable father. What that did to us. And I don't want that for my daughter,” Piper says, once she's shut Melinda's door. She heads into her own bedroom and Prue sits on her bed, watching as Piper takes off her earrings and necklace, rubs her left ring finger where her wedding ring should be.

“Piper, it's different. Leo's not abandoning her, she knows he has to go because he's helping people. And she knows he's coming back.”

“I know,” Piper says, sitting down next to Prue. “And I know she's used to him having to orb out at a moment's notice, but just because she's used to it doesn't mean it's good for her. She's so little, Prue. She needs parents she can depend on.”

“She has them,” Prue says, taking Piper's hand. “She can count on you. And Leo... he's a part of her life. She knows that he loves her. We didn't see our dad for twenty years, we had no idea if he cared about us at all. That's never going to be Leo.”

Piper nods. “You're right. I know you're right. But I think I'm starting to understand why my marriage didn't last.”

Prue pulls her into a hug. “I'm sorry, Piper. I know how much you love him.”

“Will we ever get to keep anything? Why can't we ever have anything good that doesn't get taken away?”

Piper sounds too young, suddenly, and Prue holds her tight. “You get to keep Melinda. Nothing will ever, ever take her away from you. I promise.” She shouldn't promise, she knows that, but she can't bear not to.

*

The book is back in the attic at home, and somehow, through some means they have learned not to question, the personal gain spells have all but disappeared. It looks more like the Book of Shadows they know, and that's a comfort, to have something recognizable, something the way they left it. Prue searches it cover to cover to find a way home, but there's nothing. Even if there were—even if they could write a spell that would work—without Phoebe they wouldn't have enough power, not for time travel. 

It's better, maybe, that it's not a choice. Knowing what they do now, going back to the past could drastically change the future, and if everything didn't line up just right, Melinda might never be born. After a month here, after watching Piper fall more in love with her daughter every day, Prue doesn't know if Piper could choose between keeping Melinda and getting their sister back. She doesn't know if she could ask her to choose.

She finds a spell that will summon a spirit, and the possibility of seeing Phoebe again, of talking to her, makes her hands shake, makes her excited and joyful and _scared._

“What if it doesn't work?” Piper asks, like she's afraid to believe it could. She's afraid to hope for this and be disappointed.

“What if it does?” Prue says. The spell seems simple enough, just candles and chanting. They haven't done a single spell since Phoebe died, and they've barely used their powers at all. Without the power of three they're less desirable to warlocks, and without Phoebe's premonitions they aren't led to innocents needing protection. But they are still witches, just the two of them. They can still do this.

“I miss her so much,” Piper says. “There's so much I didn't get to tell her.”

“Then let's try,” Prue says. “Let's talk to our sister.”

They light candles in a circle and read the words from the book, and when a figure starts to materialize, Piper grips Prue's hand so hard it hurts. But when they can see her clearly, it's not Phoebe.

It's their mother, transparent and ghostly.

No one speaks for a long few seconds, and Prue feels like she can't breathe, until their mom smiles, steps out of the circle and becomes solid, and gathers them immediately into her arms. “My girls,” she says. “Oh, I'm so happy to see you.”

Piper whispers “Mom” in a voice thick with tears, and Prue turns her face into her mother's neck and can't do anything but cry.

When she steps back, she just takes in the sight of Patty for a moment, how beautiful she is and how _young._ She realizes abruptly that she's older now than her mother was when she died. So is Piper, just barely. Here, their mother has been dead almost as long as she'd been alive.

“I guess you're wondering where Phoebe is,” Patty says.

“Yes,” Prue says, wiping tears from her face. “But I'm glad to see you.”

Patty places her hand against Prue's cheek and Prue shuts her eyes, thinks of all the times she had needed this, what she would have given to hear her mother's voice just one more time. “I know, darling,” Patty says, and Prue opens her eyes again and knows she can't afford to miss a single second of this.

“Mom,” Piper says, like she still can't believe it. “It's really you.”

“It's really me,” Patty says. “And Phoebe would be here if she could, but she's too new to the afterlife to be summoned. Your spell brought me in her place.”

“Is she okay?” Piper asks.

Patty smiles. “Yes. She's okay, and she wants you to know she loves you both so much.”

“Mom, I'm sorry,” Prue says. “I'm sorry I didn't protect her.”

“No,” Patty says, taking Prue's hands. “I don't blame you for this. Phoebe doesn't blame you for this. Either of you.”

Prue looks down and can't meet her mother's eyes. “She died in pain.”

Patty shakes her head. “She doesn't remember the pain now. And you don't have to worry about her. She's all right. She's with Grams and me.”

“So you know what happened?” Piper asks. “That we're not... from here?”

Their mother nods. “I'm so sorry you can't get that time back. If I could, I...” she grows quiet for a moment, eyes filling with tears, and she lets go of one of Prue's hands in order to hold Piper's. “There's so much I would change, if I could.”

“Have we seen you like this before? Can we bring you here whenever we want?” Prue asks.

“I don't get to come as often as I'd like. But,” Patty says, smiling at Piper, “I was here for your wedding.”

“You were?”

Patty nods. “And you were so beautiful. And I was so proud of you, all of you, for the women you'd become. And I'm still proud. You may have lost your way, but you're finding it. You're still my strong, smart, beautiful daughters, and I love you more than I could ever say.”

They're pulled into their mother's arms again and they both hold on like she's their lifeline in this still strange world. “I love you,” they both say, and in her mind Prue is small again, safe in her mother's arms, and as loved as anyone in the world has ever been.

“I have to go,” their mother tells them, and even as they hold on tighter they can feel her start to disappear. “It's all right,” she says. “I'll see you again.” And then it's only Prue and Piper in the attic, arms around each other.

Prue expects to feel like she's lost her mom all over again, expects the emptiness in her to widen and spread. But when she breathes in, she doesn't feel empty. Phoebe doesn't hurt anymore, and their mother loves them. When she looks at Piper, she knows, they're both going to be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> On the chance that this story gains a readership beyond a couple of my friends, it seems like a good idea to head off the possible frequently asked question of where Paige is during all this. Short answer: She doesn't exist. Longer answer: 13 years ago I stopped watching the show partway through season four and never looked back (and don't remember a thing about it,) so I don't know Paige. And because the character was created solely so they wouldn't have to cancel the show and was not part of the original plan for the series, I decided to write this story in accordance with the canon of the first three seasons.


End file.
